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By BRIAN KLEPPER America’s health plans are floundering. If their job has been to provide the nation’s mainstream families with access to affordable care (let’s leave quality out of it for the moment), they have failed miserably, though they were…

The water engulfing JAMA’s editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis is getting hotter.
A recap is here, but the Jonathan Leo flap, and subsequent response, is not going away as JAMA hoped it would.
The WSJ reports that AMA, which normally does not interfere in the editorial decisions of the journal, has asked its Journal Oversight Committee to look into [...]

With a name like “stinging nettle” it doesn’t sound like a good idea to use this plant internally or externally… does it? But stinging nettle has a long history in medicine.
One of the earliest uses of stinging nettle was in attempts to stimulate paralyzed limbs.

Whether comprehensive health reform passes this year is likely to depend on whether Senate Democrats are willing to use the so-called “budget reconciliation process,” which would allow them to pass health reform with a bare majority of 51 votes, Jonathan Oberlander said in a March 25 interview for the Health Affairs Blog. Oberlander, an associate professor of [...]

Reader Takes is a regular feature where selected op-ed style pieces from the audience at KevinMD.com will be published on the blog.
Posts are between 500 and 600 words in length, and can argue any opinion related to medicine and health care.
Articles that are provocative, well-written, free of grammatical or spelling errors, and generally follow these [...]

President Obama has called for the nation’s health care system to adopt electronic medical records – a move that he says will lead to 80 billion dollars in savings.
That figure comes from a theoretical study done in 2005. But analysts admit that real-world evidence doesn’t support the claim. For one thing, 100 percent of physicians [...]

More hospitals are resorting to so-called “dayhawk” radiology services to read their x-rays.
It’s modeled after the “nighthawk” model, where radiologists (via Shadowfax), in some cases as far away as India, remotely read films in the middle of the night.
Now, the phenomenon is happening during business hours as well, which according to radiologist Giles W. L. [...]

HR 875 – What might the so-called “Monsanto bill” really do? HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, is a limited-vision attempt by moderate Democrats and Republicans to craft food safety legislation to address the out-of-control filth and contamination that are inherent in our industrialized, now globalized, “profit-at-any-cost” food system. If the bill’s [...]

I wrote previously that pharmaceutical industry influence should be removed from physician continuing medical education courses.
The American Psychiatric Association is taking that recommendation to heart, announcing that it will end industry-sponsored seminars at its annual meeting.
Good for them.
But, I’d be interested to see how many of these professional organizations can survive the funding cut. [...]

Earlier this week, President Obama argued that we need to spend money now, in order to curtail the spiraling costs that Medicare and Medicaid will reap on future generations.
However, when it comes to primary care, the Congressional Budget Office is not so forward thinking: “Savings from some initiatives may not materialize because incentives to reduce [...]